Ideal Health Doctor

Some of our favorite foods are having a very good week — in the usual medical journals and at the San Diego gathering of the American Chemical Society that ends today. Mash them all up with just a little help from us, and we think you have a pretty good recipe for snack heaven. Read on.

Popcorn, for instance, won accolades as the “perfect snack food” because, according to University of Scranton chemist Joe Vinson, a serving has twice the polyphenols of most fruits or vegetables. Compared with fruits and veggies, which are largely water, popcorn, says Vinson, packs a more concentrated dose of the phytonutrients, which are thought to prevent cellular oxidation, the start of all things bad.

Even the kernels — those bits that get caught in your teeth — are packed with the alleged cancer-preventing antioxidant, says Vinson. But make

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Reporting from Washington As President Obama and his allies gear up to defend the landmark healthcare law he signed two years ago, they confront an unforgiving math problem: Just a tiny fraction of Americans has experienced a major benefit from the law. At the same time, tens of millions have continued to see insurance premiums and medical bills rise as they did before the legislation was signed. That reflects the design of the complex law, in which many of the key provisions were delayed in a bid to hold down costs and minimize disruptions while new systems are put in place to expand coverage. The law will not guarantee insurance to all Americans until 2014, and may take many more years to rein in healthcare costs. Read more…

As a registered dietitian I have spent as much time battling wacky weight loss diets as my clients have spent trying to lose weight. Sure, it would be great if you could “lose weight while you sleep” as one fad diet promised, but that’s simply not possible. It’s just another empty promise that can do more harm than good in the end. 

How can you tell if a fad diet is bad for you? Any diet that puts your health in jeopardy for the sake of losing weight is not good. And sometimes you can tell just by the name! 

In honor of National Nutrition Month this March, I’d like to expose some of the fad diets from the past so you won’t be as likely to fall for them in the future. I

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It turns out plastic surgery really does make you look younger, one study has found — on average, in the case of one Canadian doctor’s patients, 7.2 years younger. Some plastic surgeons “tend to use the terms more youthful and more refreshed, but precise quantification of these attributes has remained elusive,” a team of cosmetic surgeons wrote in a study published Monday in the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery (italics theirs). Hoping to come up with “an objective measure of surgical success” — and not have to depend solely on patient-reported satisfaction to assess the success of cosmetic surgery procedures — the researchers, from the University of Toronto in Canada and the NorthShore University Health System in Evanston, Ill., asked first-year medical students to view pictures of 60 patients (54 women and six men, age 45 to 72) upon whom one of the physicians, Dr. Peter A. Adamso Read more…